The author characterized that there are 8 distinctive “archetypes” of people with respect how to treat money:
1. The Guardian: always alert and careful.
2. The Pleasure Seeker: prioritizes pleasure and enjoyment in the here and now.
3. The Idealist: places the greatest value on creativity, compassion, social justice, or spiritual growth.
4. The Saver: seeks security and abundance by accumulating more financial assets.
5. The Star: spends, invests, or gives money away to be recognized, feel hip or classy, and increase self-esteem.
6. The Innocent: avoids putting significant attention on money and believes or hopes that life will work out for the best.
7. The Caretaker: gives and lends money to express compassion and generosity.
8. The Empire Builder: thrives on power and innovation to create something of enduring value.

The “Wanting Mind” is the force that compels us to squander our capital, be it financial or spiritual. It is always craving an experience different from the one it currently has. Wanting Minds insists that things need to change in order for us to be happy. The more we want, the more we want. The happiness we feel when we get what we want comes from the absence of wanting.

The 4-year-old in all of us establishes our relationship with money. Answer the following questions: 1. I will feel safe if ___________, 2. If only I could have _____, then I’d be happy, 3. What I want more than anything is ___________.

Author’s recommended diversified portfolio (no bond): US Large – 21%, US Large Value – 21%, US Small – 9%, US Small Value 9%, International Large Value 8%, International Small – 4%, International Small Value – 4%, Emerging Markets Portfolio 3%, Emerging Markets Small 3%, Emerging Markets Value 3%, Real Estate – 10%, Commodities – 5%.

On giving, the author recommends giving 1% of your net worth every year or 10% of your income.

Lots of good tips on investing – the author’s strength. The author appears to have studies various religions and seems to lean toward Buddhism. For example, he advocated Middle Way. He also emphasizes Yoga, meditation, and other new wave things to get people more aligned and balanced.

I think the following from Amazon’s reviewer (Singha) just about sums it up:
1. Don’t use your head. Lose yourself to the moment, passion. Don’t get calm, get charged. Trust yourself. Don’t over-analyze. Put pressure on yourself! Devise a method to get yourself in the right frame. Use it every time.
2. Don’t put limits on yourself. Don’t set goals. They aren’t stretching, they’re limiting. Chase a dream that is downright unachievable.
3. Hard work is overrated. The key is to do the right things, not necessarily doing things right
4. Don’t try and hedge your risks. Put all your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET
5. There is no such thing as too much self assurance. Arrogant SOBs who believe in themselves are the ones who run the world. Don’t believe the experts (think Dell, Buffet, Gates, Paige&Brin, Columbus, the earth is flat?, etc). And confidence is not your track record… these guys weren’t confident in themselves after they had proved themselves right… no, they proved it before.
6. Being a team player involves conforming and conforming will at the end of the day bring you nothing but mundane results being achieved by all the others conforming.

My take-aways to become an over-acheiver:
1. Design for yourself a pre-performance routine can help. But it must be yours. “A pre-performance routine is about getting your mind ready to perform.”
2. Pick a target to shoot and focus – like playing a tennis match.
3. Stress is a good thing for the overachievers – like Bill Russels’s barfing up before every game. Don’t try to remove the stress.
4. Do the best that are within your control and don’t worry about anything else. Be “Zen” like.
5. Define your philosophy of performance and engagement.
6. The over-achiever doesn’t dwell on his failures but rise above them – the ability to “mess around.” Michael Jordan is the best basketball player because he failed the most. John Wooden’s guiding principles, ” The team that makes the most mistakes wins.”
7. Use the “Trusting Mindset” during performance, not “Training Mindset.”

Great book on becoming an overachiever. Lots of good sports stories, which are the author’s area of expertise. Some of the stories a bit long but could be appealing to sports fan or athletes who want to achiever super performance.

It took me a while to get used to radio interview dialog format of this book. Key take ways from the interviews with the following people:

Jim Rohn: Don’t start the day without having it finished.

Mark Victor Hanson: Tithing. Four principles of success: 1. Figure out what you want. 2. Write them down. 3. Visualize it. 4. Get a team together and scheme it. Money is energy – velocity of money. Meditate, cogitate, ruminate and pray about your day for 15 minutes. About selling: prospect, present, persuade and close.

Wally “Famous” Amos: Do something about your idea. Surround yourself with a good team. Going the extra mile; do more than than is absolutely asked or expected of you. Promote your business. Give all the positive energy, all your love, all the attention you can do what you want right now.

Jack Canfield: Having high self-esteem (like poker chips). E(vent) + R(esponse) = O(utcom). “The universe rewards action, not thinking.” Regarding “Aladdin Factor,” five reasons people don’t ask: 1) ignorance: they don’t know what to ask for, 2) limiting and inaccurate beliefs that people have, 3) fear of rejection, 4) low self-esteem, 5) pride. Two ways to use subconscious: 1) ask the subconscious for information 2) program the subconscious (stupid employee) with information you want to have. Master-minding: hang around with people making twice as much you do.

Robert Allen: Internet marketing: it’s “yes,” “no” or “maybe,” when you make an offer. Look for mentors; your income is the average of your ten best friends.”

Sharon Lechter: You work to learn. “be-do-have” means be a rich person, do what the rich do, then you’ll have what the rich have.

Michael Gerber: Work on business, not in it. Business IS the product. Then you take it to the next step – become a brand. Great entrepreneurs tell great stories. The sole reason for creating a business is to sell it. The system is the solution, not people. Your company must become your software. Intelligent systems in the hands of ordinary people produce intelligent results. Ask yourself, ” What’s the one thing I could do that’s impossible to do, but if I could do it, it would immediately transforms my company?” Orchestration is to create a system so everybody does it identically – called a “brand.”

Jim McCann (1-800-FLOWER): Develop relationship with your customers. Figure out a business that you’re interested in and gets your excited. Don’t worry about the margins. Everyone is a brand manager.

Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing): Differences against traditional marketing: 1) invest time, energy and imagination, 2) no mystique, 3) geared toward small businesses, 4) based on profit (not sales), 5) based on experience and judgment (guesswork). 6) maintaining focus (not diversification) 7) grow geometrically (not linearly) – enlarge the size of each transaction. Don’t look for competitors to obliterate, look for other businesses you have the same kind of propspects and the same kind of standard to cooperate. It takes 9 times of marketing message penetration to move a customer from apathy to the state of purchase readiness. Marketing is not an event, it’s a process. Patience, imagination, sensitivity, ego strength, aggressiveness, embracing changes, generous, energetic, constant learning, maintaining focus, taking action are the personal characteristics of a successful guerrilla marketer. People tend to patronize business that are of the following (‘ents’): commitment, investment, consistent, confident, assortments of weapons. People buy value and confidence in you.

This book reads like a TV-hit “24” script. Robert Langdon is the hero of the movie, instead of the Jack Bower. Of course, Langdon is a Symbologist Professor specialized in deciphering ancient mysteries and symbols, and etc. The novel is a real page-turner and having the a 7-day expiration period imposed by the ebook library help speed up my reading. I finished it just within a day of expiration, thanks to the recent plane trips.

The heavily tattooed villain, named Ma’lakh left a severed hand (Langdon’s friend’s – Peter Solomon’s) in the Capitol Hill building and tricked Langdon on a goose chase to find and save his friend. Peter’s sister, Katherine Solomon, a Noetic scientist also got involved and almost got herself killed.

The story involved CIA’s directors and many prominent characters who tried to cover up their Masonic society’s rituals – doesn’t seem all that important to deem a national security issue to me. But I got to understand a bit of history and customs surrounding the Masonic society.

Also, I learned a different angle of interpreting the Bible, like considering human minds as “gods” and the human minds of are capable of affecting matters – this is no different than Chinese Qigong. It’s a little anti-climatic to see that at the end the villain fails to find the Lost Word. And the Word is nothing but the ancient wisdom from the Bible, Koran, and etc. Is it really worth killing people over it? And the surprise twist that the villain turns out to be the son of Peter Solomon doesn’t seem very believable to me.

The book was fairly easy to read especially on my Sony Ebook reader, which is more conducive to sequential reading of novels like this. Also the detailed description of the many monuments and buildings in Washington DC makes me want to go visit there really soon. I hope they alter the plot for the movie edition to make the buildings stand out more and the motivations behind the characters more interesting and believable, if they ever make it into a movie.

This is like a scientific explanation/version of the “Blink” book by Gladwell, although I think Gladwell tells better stories. I like all the explanations about the dopamine and the internal debates within our brain between amygdala (emotional brain) and prefrontal cortex (logical brain). When confronted with complex problem (more than 4 variables), it may be better to trust the amygdala, which is good at tapping on our past failures/experience. Too much logical thinking/analysis by prefrontal cortex could get us bogged down by complexity, like in the poker game.

I especially like the explanation about how one is fascinated by seeing a certain product he likes. The release of dopamine gives the person the urge to buy until the prefrontal cortex jumps in to analyze the situation and perform a cost/benefit analysis. Without this balance force, we could be buying a lot of things we cannot afford, as some out-of-control American shoppers with overdrawn credit cards often do. The use of credit card, as a form of delayed pain, also helps to silence the warning from our prefrontal cortex.

To facilitate good check and balance, one must practice thinking about how we think. The ability to tell whether the arguments are emotional or logical could help break the deadlock in indecisiveness. The surprising thing I learned is that our emotional brain is a better-evolved part of our brain. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to make complex decision with many variables. Somehow our emotional brain has distilled our past experience into “gut feelings” or “sixth sense” that cuts through many levels of complexity.

The use of the flight simulator allows the pilot to gain experience and train the decision making process without too harsh of a consequence, like crashing a plane. Perhaps, we should all be playing with life simulator in our young age to help us making better decisions in our life.

This is an excellent book. It adds a lot to my understanding of how our brain works and help explain why people behave in certain ways.

It’s hard to imagine for old timer like me to think a free product can be any good. If it’s any good, why would anyone give it away for free? Well, the new electronic media have near-zero marginal cost. Therefore, giving away these free are not too costly, thus the dawn of the new “free” economy.

The author, Chris Anderson who also wrote “The Long Tail,” gave a pretty convincing set of arguments that the new “abundant world,” as opposed to the “scarce world” we were more familiar with in the 20th century, presents a new set of challenge to producers of “contents” or “IP (intellectual property)” to derive value and thus charging the users for money. The new generation, especially those from China, are not going to pay for contents because they can easily transported in “bits” over the internet and they have more time than money, but they’re willing to pay for something physical (“atoms”) or experience (like a concert). Giving away free music, contents are the new way to maximize the reach to the maximum number of audience. The best you can do is probably to charge 5~10% of the audience for the “premium” versions, because they have more money than time. Another way is have ads subsidize the cost but this is getting increasing difficult as ads are not as effective. (Google ads remains the king of ads because it’s directly related to people’s interest at the time of the search.) The other way is to give away the first one free and charge the follow-on products once the large audience base has been built up.

Though the book is a bit long and repetitive but it’s worth listening to on audio. It teaches you how to make money off “free” goods in this new world of “abundance.” This is a scary time for most knowledge workers as a lot of our results and efforts can be easily moved from one place to all over the world through Internet very quickly and “freely.” We need to learn to adjust to the new pricing model and take advantage of it. Living with “abundance” can be hard.

This is Jim Rohn at his best. Such a concise book containing so many words of wisdom.

The 5 key words
1. Fundamental: “Success of no more than the natural consequence of consistently applying the fundamentals of success to life.”
2. Wealth: Wealth that comes form the conversion of effort and enterprise into currency and equity.
3. Happiness: freedom from the negative children of fear such as worry, low self-esteem, envy, greed, resentment, prejudice, and hatred. A way of interpreting the world and its events and having values in balance.
4. Discipline
5. Success: making your life what you want it to be.

The 7 strategies are:
1. Unleash the power of goals: Four great motivators: a. recognition, feeling of winning, family, benevolence (charity). Long range goals: Ask yourself, “What do I want to do, be, see, have, go, and share? Write down time horizon to achieve. Pick one from each category of 1-yr, 3-yr, 5-yr, 10-r goals and describe in details what you want and the reasons.

2. Seek knowledge: Capturing the treasures of knowledge. Gain wisdom through personal reflection on journals weekly, monthly, yearly, and through learning from others by books and tapes, by listening to the wisdom and folly of others and by observations of winners and losers.

3. Learn how to change: “To have more than you’ve got, become more than you are.” “Unless you change how you are, you’ll always have what you’ve got.” “Better is not something you wish; it’s something you become.” Seasons of life: Winter: a time to grow strong. Sprint: a time to take advantage. Summer: a time to take care, protect what you’re created. All good will be attached. All values must be defended. Fall: a time to take responsibility, reap the results of our springs and summers. Eliminate self-imposed limitations: procrastination, blame, and excuses. “You can change all things for the better when you change yourself for the better.”

4. Control your finances: 70/30 rule: 70% on essential and luxury and the 30% on charity, capital investment, and savings.

5. Master time: Learn to say “no” by saying “No, I don’t think I can. But if that changes, I’ll give you a call.” When you work work, when you play play. “Don’t start the day/week/month/year until you have it finished.”

6. Surround yourself with winners: “It’s easy to remain mediocre. All you need to do is spend major time on minor things with minor people.” “Spend more time with the right people.”

7. Learn the art of living well: 2-quarter attitude. “Be happy with what you have while pursuing what you want.” “The good life is not an amount; it’s an attitude, an act, an idea, a discovery, a search.”

“Resolve” – promise yourself that you’ll never give up. Why not? Why not you? Why not now?